Expert Interview with Corbett Barr from Insanely Useful Media

As part of our series on Productivity we’ve interviewed Corbett Barr to
quiz him about his own personal productivity challenges, how he handles
them and the tools he uses day to day to help.

Corbett Barr is founder of Insanely Useful Media, which publishes the
blogs Think Traffic and Expert Enough to an audience of over 100,000 monthly readers. Follow
Corbett on Twitter: @corbettbarr.

Meetings

Meetings are often cited as being unproductive – whether that’s
because they run on too long, are unfocused, fail to result in action
(the list is endless!). Please share your experiences and your tips for
keeping meetings productive.

I like the social aspect of meetings, but they can definitely be
unproductive as hell. My approach to keeping meetings productive now is
to avoid them as much as possible. I meet with my assistant editor about
once a week to go over critical projects. Other than that, I rarely take
meetings unless I could use some social interaction.

Workload

How do you manage your own personal workload?

First, I try to say “no” to as much as I can. It's easy to get in a
habit of taking on more and more projects that don't really help the
core mission.

Then, I usually have a set of recurring things I have to do, along with
between one and three other bigger transformative projects I’m working
on.

To manage tasks, I like. Beyond that, I use Google Docs and Evernote to keep track of
project notes and goals.

How do you keep track of what your team are working on?

We use email a lot (probably way too much) to communicate the status of
various projects. Other than that, we don’t often use formal project
tracking tools unless something is very time-sensitive or is
client-focused.

Collaboration

How do you manage collaboration between your employees? Are there any
tools or apps you’d recommend?

We use Gmail, Google Docs and Skype. For sharing
big files (especially for video editing), we use Amazon S3.

Email

How often do you check email a day? Do you have a system for managing
your inbox?

I’ve found that if I leave my inbox open all day, it dominates my day
and I get much less done (I become reactive instead of proactive). To
mitigate this, I’ve gotten in the habit of completely closing my inbox
in between uses, when I’m actually working on tasks. Then, I have to
consciously open my inbox again when I’m ready or need it, instead of
reacting to the latest incoming message.

Remote working

What are your tips for working efficiently when you’re away from the
office?

Bring headphones. Other than that it’s the same for me whether I’m in
“the office” or on the road.

Your top productivity tip

If you had to give one tip to small companies looking to grow and
improve their output, what would it be?

Cut meetings down to a bare minimum. Give your employees way more
respect and responsibility so they can do their work well. Ruthlessly
cut out tasks and projects that aren’t high-value.

ROI

What ROI have you seen on your efforts to improve productivity
within your company?

We don’t have a way to tie hard ROI to productivity changes.

On the “softer” side, I can tell you that we’re very happy with this
system of holding very few meetings and focusing only on essential and
high-leverage projects and tasks. We’ve been running the business under
the 37 Signals philosophy as explained in their books Rework and Getting
Real. There’s no way I would ever go back. This is the future of work.